NanoViricides, Inc. (OTC BB: NNVC.OB) (the "Company"), announced today that the mark "nanoviricides" has now become a registered trademark under the US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO). The mark was entered into the "principal register" of trademarks at the USPTO on April 20, 2010.
The mark "nanoviricides" consists of standard characters without claim to any particular font, style, size, or color. It is protected in the corresponding plural and singular forms as well as any capitalizations.
The Company created the novel word "nanoviricide®" in 2005. The Company defined "nanoviricide" to describe a specific type of antiviral nanomaterial that is designed to be capable of binding to, encapsulating, and potentially destroying virus particles. Nanoviricides are based on the TheraCour® polymeric micelle technology.
A nanoviricide is created by chemically attaching a "ligand" to a base TheraCour nanomicelle. The ligand is a special chemical entity that is designed to bind to a virus particle. The specificity of a nanoviricide is expected to be determined by the specificity of the ligand.
Viruses continuously change by a number of mechanisms such as mutations, recombinations, or re-assortments. This is why influenza vaccines and antibodies do not always work well against novel strains of influenza. This is also why attempts to develop "universal" vaccines against a number of different viruses such as HIV, Influenza, Dengue, and Ebola have met with limited successes.
It is generally accepted that, in spite of extensive changes in the virus, a given virus continues to bind to the same cell surface receptor(s) in the same fashion. The Company believes that it is possible to design ligands which mimic such invariant binding signature of a given virus. Using such biomimetic ligands, the Company believes that it is possible to create a nanoviricide that will remain active against a given type of virus, in spite of the changes the virus undergoes. The Company believes that a nanoviricide so designed would "fool" the virus into thinking that the virus is binding to and entering a host cell, while in fact it would be binding to and becoming entrapped inside a nanoviricide micelle. The Company believes that some viruses may be dismantled or destroyed upon interaction with a nanoviricide designed against them. Thus the Company believes that there is a strong likelihood of developing nanoviricides from which a given virus could not escape, in spite of mutations.
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